What is BatchRouter

BatchRouter is a single, OpenAI-Batch-compatible API that routes your batch-AI workloads across many providers. You submit a batch once, BatchRouter quotes the job and dispatches it to the cheapest eligible provider lane that meets your deadline and constraints, then tracks execution, billing, and delivery — and hands you back signed results plus a routing receipt that explains exactly where the work ran and why.

You integrate against one base URL (https://api.batchrouter.com, everything under /v1) and one credit balance. No per-provider accounts, no per-provider SDKs, no lock-in.

The problem it solvesCopy Anchor Link

Batch AI is only cheap if you can find the right provider, model, price, capacity, and SLA window at the moment you submit the job. In practice that is hard:

• Provider prices change constantly, and capacity and rate limits are opaque.
• Every native batch provider has a different API and a different SLA window.
• You do not want to compare every provider before every batch — but picking one and sticking with it leaves money and throughput on the table.
• When a job fails or a provider is paused, you are on the hook for retries and reconciliation.

BatchRouter sits between you and batch-capable providers as the control plane. You describe the work and your constraints; BatchRouter owns the routing, the customer pricing, the margin, and the billing — and keeps it all explainable.

When to use itCopy Anchor Link

BatchRouter is the right fit when you have:

• High-volume, latency-tolerant AI work — classification, extraction, summarization, embeddings, enrichment, evaluation — where a job can complete over hours rather than milliseconds.
• A need for cost or capacity flexibility across providers without integrating each one yourself.
• SLA or routing constraints (a deadline, an allowed region, a privacy tier) that you want routing to apply automatically.
• An existing OpenAI Batch integration you would like to point at a multi-provider backend with minimal code change.
• Single requests that need an answer now, next to your batch work. Send them to POST /v1/chat/completions, or add "batch": true to queue one at the batch price.

Headline capabilitiesCopy Anchor Link

SLA-aware lanesCopy Anchor Link

Every batch has one 24-hour SLA (sla_tier accepts standard, flex, and priority for compatibility; all three are treated as standard) and a routing_mode (cheapest by default, or sla_aware, public_only, edge_only, hybrid, privacy_constrained). Routing applies hard gates first — task support, model compatibility, capacity, rate limits, privacy/region constraints, provider health — then ranks the eligible lanes. By default you get the cheapest lane that can finish in time; large jobs can be split across lanes when that meets capacity or deadline.

Transparent quotes and receiptsCopy Anchor Link

Quotes are free. Call POST /v1/quotes/model (or /v1/quotes/workflow) before you commit, and you see the estimated cost up front — credits are only reserved when you create the batch and are settled from actual usage. Every completed batch carries a routing receipt and a billing receipt (GET /v1/batches/{batchId}/billing-receipt) so you can audit exactly what ran, where, and what it cost. Routing is explainable by principle: a quote always shows why a lane was selected.

OpenAI compatibilityCopy Anchor Link

A drop-in OpenAI-Batch surface lives under /v1/openai/v1/* (batches and files). Point an existing openai SDK at that base path to create, poll, and download results with no code changes and no webhook required — BatchRouter serializes its native primitives into OpenAI shapes. The native /v1/batches/* and /v1/files/* surface is richer and unchanged; use whichever fits your stack.

Chat completionsCopy Anchor Link

POST /v1/chat/completions takes a standard OpenAI chat body. Without extra fields it answers directly, and stream: true streams the answer as server-sent events. With "batch": true the request is queued as a one-item batch at the batch price, and you poll GET /v1/chat/completions/{id} or get a webhook. See Chat completions.

Provider marketplaceCopy Anchor Link

Providers publish wholesale offerings — models, prices, capacity, regions — into a public catalog you can browse without authentication: GET /v1/catalog/models, GET /v1/catalog/workflow-products, and GET /v1/providers. The marketplace is what gives routing a real choice of lanes, and it grows without any change on your side.

Webhooks and flexible deliveryCopy Anchor Link

Results are available by polling (GET /v1/batches/{batchId}/results) or via a signed artifact URL (GET /v1/batches/{batchId}/artifact-url). For push delivery, set a per-batch webhook or an org-wide default (PUT /v1/auth/account/delivery-webhook); payloads are signed with X-BatchRouter-Signature (HMAC-SHA256). You can also configure delivery targets and retention to control where results land and how long they are kept.

How a job flowsCopy Anchor Link

1. Quote — POST /v1/quotes/model (free) to see the cost and selected lane.
2. Create — POST /v1/batches with an Idempotency-Key header; you get a 202 and a batch id (batch_…).
3. Poll — GET /v1/batches/{batchId} as it moves through received → validated → priced → queued → dispatching → running → finalizing → completed (other terminal states: failed, canceled, expired) — read batch.state.
4. Retrieve — page results from GET /v1/batches/{batchId}/results, or pull a signed artifact via GET /v1/batches/{batchId}/artifact-url.

You authenticate with a Bearer br_live_… key (created in the dashboard or via agent-first registration), and you buy credits in the dashboard — there is no public billing-checkout endpoint.

Next stepsCopy Anchor Link